Personally, I tend to favor the pet classes for 5+ boxing as it gives you more versatility in terms of damage/interrupt/annoyance focusing. As an example, if I have a rogue and a druid attacking me, I'll sic the felguards and felhunter on the druid to keep him slowed/silenced/etc for a few seconds while I dot/fear the rogue. I'm sure you can see the possibilities. Also, with hunters, you just doubled your group size and ALL 10-20 of you are un-CC'able for 20 seconds every few minutes.
It's weird. I replied to this thread 2 days ago but the replies never showed up. huh.
Anyway, I am going through with this on short notice. I started RAFing new accounts and just wound up now with 10 accounts and a new team of my old alts and a couple of new guys to round it out.
I decided on another paladin tank and a new paladin healer. Before I discuss the rest of my new team, I have a question about the paladin healer. Is she going to be any good at multibox healing? I thought that paladins had a cool new AOE healing move, but I now see that it's been changed to make it a little too complex for me to use. Maybe I should swap her out for a shaman healer instead? I'd be missing another blessing and aura, but healing is too important to mess around with.
I'd go with either a priest or a druid, personally. Now that druids have anytime rez and an AoE HoT, it's tough not to like 'em.
I'm looking forward to getting my 10-box set up running. I can tell already setting up a 10-man raid is going to be so much more intense than 5 manning things. Just thinking about that extra layer of positioning while increasing my synergy and coordination gives me goosebumps. Even better, having the leeway to entirely alter my playstyle to experiment and find out what can function as an adequite trade off. I'm REALLY looking forward to trying to leave my balance druid out of boomkin form, just for the added HoTs. I may even be able to get by with just 1 or even 0 healing specs, once I delve a bit more in to Paladin tank-while-self healing.
W000T Another 10-Boxer.
I should have said something sooner, but welcome to the family. 10 man raids in WOTLK should be very intresting and challenging for us running 10 characters. Personally, I'm looking forward to something that requires more skill than a lot of old "tank-and-spank" type fights. I run 2 Paladins, 4 Shaman, 1 Priest, 2 Mages, and 1 Druid.
The Druid's job is to nuke and provide the elemental debuff so that the rest of the team can nuke hard.
The Druid also provides thorns and blessing of the wild for the party.
The Priest is specced Holy (suprised, right? :-P, jk), and I use her to toss heals to the team. The heals I have bound on my G15 keyboard to odd combinations such as SHIFT-ALT-F4 for Circle of Healing, etc. I basically use the top segment G1-G6 for my Priest. I've brought her all the way down the Holy line too and have gotten the "Oh *(%&*@ someone in my team is about to die, so I better keep her alive" aka Guardian Spirit talent
The Mages are both Arcane specced. I use Focus Magic on each of the mages (giving them an additional 3% crit chance that can't be used on self). I use a missle rotation and arcane barrage atm.
The Shammis are all full Elemental; they function as my mail wearing nukers and pseudo healers. I have some of their keys bound to the G15 as well so that I can control healing from one team to another quickly. If my Priest were to die, 1 key press from my shaman would get any of my characters to full health, while still providing nukes from the shaman (since I only have 3 of the shaman set to drop a big heal in the event of an emergency)
One Paladin is specc'd Protection, she tanks well. I'm debating on what to do with the other Paladin as far as specs go (she wont be 70 until about 2 weeks from now), I'm thinking Holy for her, but I might just do 2 full protection tanks. Either way, the Paladins each provide blessings, auras, and dual consecration castings, etc.
Cheers.
Thanks for the replies guys. This thread got totally screwed up when the boards fixed up the issue it was having with wrong times being logged. The first half of the thread is just a mess. Apologies. I can't even seem to edit it out.
Anyway, you guys have some good input! Rin, your ideas are a lot like mine! I am totally with you and following what you're saying.
I looked into it more, and I LOVE the glyph you can give a paladin which heals the GROUP for 10% of what you healed the tank for with holy light. That might make a paladin a great boxing healer afterall. Stick a beacon of light on one tank, heal the other tank, and the group gets 10% bonus from that. So you can give healing to everyone at once just about. Good stuff. I can't wait to see how that works. If it doesn't work out, I have a ton of spare shaman from my disbanded shaman team that I can replace the extra paladin with. My only major difference from you is I am leveling a warlock for the blood pact and soulstone instead of another mage, though I will be able to RAF up a second mage just in case.
I am going to run 5 windows on two computers using a USB multicaster. I have to use a USB because I run off a Mac and they told me that it might not work with the regular one. I am not sure about this, but that's what Vetra told me. Right now I can only effectively play the characters as two separate teams of 5 since I only have one good computer, but I am capable of running them all at once on one computer if I HAD to. I plan to get another computer soon. My cashflow isn't as good as it should be to do this, but I will sacrifice my other gaming hobbies to make up for it. No more console games.
Ugh, ya no kidding on the screwyness. I actually deleted my reply after I realized it had nothing to do with what you asked, lol. Oh well.